The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  It is easy to get lost in Central Park, or at least to become disoriented among the meandering maze of paths on the north side of the reservoir. Even native New Yorkers, grooved into the regular grid of their city, are known to keep an eye on the skyline of Midtown to be reassured of their whereabouts. On that Saturday they did it the easy way, hugging the lake on the Bridle Path as they fell into a discussion of the unthinkable: its justification, its feasibility, its risks and likely outcomes, pummelling and re-examining scenarios until, tired and cold to their bones, they stopped to take seats around a crude picnic table by the Great Lawn softball fields.

  Toby had said nothing since they had entered the park. At times he had even appeared to be letting his attention drift out over the lake towards the comforts of Manhattan. But after straddling a bench seat he rested a hand on Michael’s shoulder. ‘Probably just me being a little bit obtuse here, mate, but what I can’t altogether see is … I mean there are quite a few little things wrong with the world when you start to think about it, which I generally try not to. War, genocide, torture.’ He dropped his hand and shuffled slightly away to light a cigarette. ‘Then there’s racism, and the female half of the population not getting a fair crack of the whip, if you’ll forgive the expression. Plus apartheid, Abo rights, child marriages. Not to mention trashing the planet, world running out of oil, testing lipstick on monkeys, white rhinos having a tough time of it out there. I mean one could go on for a long time.’

  ‘And your point, Toby?’ said Hélène, smiling despite herself.

  ‘My point, sweetie, is who knows where we’d end up with enough laps of this bloody reservoir. I mean why not threaten to release the damn thing if they don’t stop clubbing seals or drilling in Alaska, or if the superpowers don’t get their ducks in a row for SALT II?’

  Stephen’s impatience was palpable but Toby forestalled him with a comic policeman’s hand. ‘Before Stephen is kind enough to enlighten me, I just want to ask’ – he exhaled smoke and gestured vaguely towards the trees behind – ‘What would we all think if some harmless little group of well-meaning souls freezing their nuts off on the other side of the park were coming up with the idea of blackmailing the world unless they got their own way on something that those of us freezing our nuts off on this side of the park didn’t happen to agree with, like, I don’t know …

  ‘Banning abortion,’ said Seema.

  ‘… banning abortion,’ said Toby with a grateful wave. ‘I mean, imagine someone firing them all up with figures about thousands upon thousands of innocent, unborn babies being massacred right, left and centre, then telling them the least they can do is threaten to put anthrax in the mail, firebomb a few clinics, whatever.’

  Stephen tried to interrupt again but Toby was in full flow. ‘I mean up to this point in my life I can’t really say I’ve seen myself in the front line of defending due process, so to speak …’

  Stephen gave a scornful laugh. ‘Due process? Due process, Toby? Ossifying of the power structure. Material relationships expressed as ideals. Read your German Ideology.’

  Toby took out a little notebook from his coat pocket and made a show of preparing to write down the name. ‘By?’

  Stephen looked away in disgust. Seema suppressed a smile. ‘Forgive us, Stephen, but you can’t assume we all go along with the idea that due process isn’t worth respecting just because Karl Marx didn’t have a high opinion of it.’

  ‘Quite right, sweetheart.’ Toby had put the notebook away and was drawing on his cigarette, making the tip glow in the cold air. ‘And I think it might have been Russell who said “Much that passes as idealism is disguised love of power”. Or it might have been my old man. Anyway, we need to watch ourselves here.’

  Stephen, parading his look of exaggerated patience, was about to respond when Seema spoke again. ‘So do you have an answer, Michael?’

  Michael met her eye, cursing himself for his disorientation whenever she addressed him as directly as this, looking into his eyes, speaking his name. He turned away for a moment towards the gritty patches of the softball diamond still visible here and there through the snow. ‘I’m not sure there is an answer in principle. But there’s the obvious pragmatic point that a lot of progress has come about because people ignored the law and “due process” and went in for some form of direct action.’

  Seema, seeing something like pain in Michael’s eyes, turned to look away. ‘Like the Declaration of Independence, or the Civil Rights Movement.’

  Hélène was blowing into her hands. ‘Or the ANC and anti-apartheid.’

  Toby looked at what was left of his cigarette, as if wondering where it had all gone. ‘Or the FBI break-in. Anybody wish they hadn’t done that?’

  ‘Thank you all.’ Stephen folded his arms and hunched his shoulders, partly against the cold, partly to suggest that there was nothing more to be said on the point.

  Michael frowned. ‘Doesn’t quite answer Toby’s point, though. As I said, I don’t think there necessarily is an answer, at least not a neat theoretical one that applies to every situation.’

  ‘A priori, as it were,’ said Toby, widening his eyes and dipping his chin, as if looking over spectacles.

  Hélène refused to let herself smile. Michael placed both hands on the table with a small slap. ‘It seems to me in the end we just have to make the call on the basis of what’s in front of us, the opportunity we’ve got, the likelihood of success, the consequences of failure, the risks – to ourselves and others.’

  Toby exhaled smoke and shook his head. ‘Not good enough, mate. With the exception of my honourable friend to the left, I think we’d all be willing to salute “due process” and all who sail in her. But as we also seem to have agreed, sometimes a little extra-mural action seems justified. Ergo the real question is – under what circumstances is it right to flush due process down the dunny? And even if there isn’t a neat little theoretical answer, Michael, sure as hell there’s an obligation to show not just that something is very wrong but that normal means, due process if you like, isn’t going to put it right. And on top of that, you’ve got to demonstrate that the likely outcome, ceteris paribus, is pretty well overwhelmingly in favour of the greater good, as commonly understood by all sane and reasonable people as represented by the five of us sitting here freezing our etc etc…’

  Michael could now not help smiling – needing no reminding that Toby was no fool. ‘Challenge accepted. And here’s the thing, Toby – if you think my answer’s not up to it then I suggest we forget all about it and go sit ourselves by a radiator somewhere.’

  ‘Now you’re talking.’ Toby bent with an effort and pushed the cigarette into the icy grass at his feet.

  Helped by the cold, Michael managed to keep his hands in his pockets. ‘First off, we’re not imposing our own cause on anybody. We’re demanding that governments do what they’ve already agreed to do. Virtually every country has signed up to a formal resolution on immunizing the world’s kids. What I’m saying here is that the “cause”, if you like, is something that has been decided by due process.’

  Toby held up both hands in a shorthand acknowledgement of the point, then pushed them back into the pockets of his parka. Hélène stared at him for a long moment, and turned her attention to what Michael was saying. ‘Second, I think we can safely say that due process isn’t cutting it. Nothing’s happening. As I said, the data are all sitting there on my desk.’

  Toby again held up his hands while Stephen looked away across the park with the patient air of a man waiting for the obvious conclusion to be reached. Michael continued to address Toby. ‘Next, people who fire-bomb abortion clinics or hijack planes are inflicting harm on others for the sake of advancing their own beliefs. That’s not what we’d be doing here. We’ve no intention of releasing the virus. We’re not going to get anybody hurt. We’re not even going to carry out the threat to go public, because that in itself might do a lot of harm. Like I said, if it doesn’t work we just … forget it ever happened.
Milk-and-water stuff, isn’t it, Stephen?’

  Stephen made his patient ‘told you this all along’ face as Toby again gestured assent. The temperature was dropping further, the light beginning to fade, the first purple of evening gathering its weight over the park.

  Hélène was shaking her head. ‘You really, honestly, seriously, think there’s a chance they’d give in to it?’

  Michael bit his lip in thought. ‘I believe there’s a chance. Sure, they’ll do everything they can to find out where the threat’s coming from. But if they don’t get anywhere then sooner or later they’re going to start weighing up the pros and cons. And what they’ll likely focus on is the political fallout of a panic. Government totally unprepared. Loss of public confidence. That’s what’ll get weighed against what it would cost to go along – a few billion dollars plus twisting a few arms and spending some political capital around the world.’

  Stephen had wrapped his arms around his body and was staring up at a flight of Canada geese passing over the lake. ‘What we may safely assume is that they’ll follow the path of least political resistance.’

  Seema was searching Michael’s face. ‘And no one would get hurt?’

  ‘No one would get hurt.’

  ‘Except very possibly us.’ Toby was lighting another cigarette, stamping his feet in the pile of white-rimed leaves under the table. It was Michael’s turn to raise his hands in acknowledgement of the point. ‘No denying that, Toby. Trace it to any of us and we pretty much know what to expect.’

  A silence fell as the thought of the personal risk, long held in the background, came out into the open.

  Toby eventually broke the spell, cigarette smoke mingling with the frost of his breath. ‘Can’t be a consideration though, can it? Doesn’t count for a lot in the scales of what we’re talking about. Seems to me we could cheerfully leave it right out of the paddock.’

  Hélène looked at Toby, and then down at the worn earth and frozen snow. Only Michael did not seem surprised.

  ‘We should go,’ said Seema, rising to her feet as the sun made a feeble attempt to break through a low band of cloud.

  ‘Preferably somewhere warm.’ Toby looked at his half-smoked cigarette and dropped it in a drift of snow.

  As they crossed Fifth Avenue, Hélène waited for Toby, who had decided he could probably manage another hot dog, and now the two of them walked together, some little way behind the others. Toby sighed with a mixture of satisfaction and regret as he swallowed the last of the frankfurter, wiping a touch of mustard from his lips before pulling his parka up over the lower half of his face. ‘How do you stand this after Africa?’

  ‘I quite like it, to tell the truth. Probably be colder in Montreal.’ She took his arm as they crossed Park Avenue. ‘You were good today, Toby.’ He squeezed her arm happily in the crook of his own. ‘But maybe you could cut down just a little bit on the Latin. Resist the temptation to wind Stephen up at every possible opportunity?’

  Toby smiled under the zip of the parka, accepting the rebuke as a small intimacy. ‘Can’t help it, Hel. Fella thinks he can sit me in a high chair and feed me shit off a spoon just because he’s a don at some poxy Oxford college.’

  ‘Was a don. And it was your college, too, in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we all make mistakes.’

  Fifty yards ahead, the others were disappearing down the steps into the subway. ‘Do you really mean that, about Oxford being a mistake?’

  ‘Do as a matter of fact. Should have stayed in Oz. Apart from meeting you, of course.’

  At the time Michael, Hélène, Seema, Stephen and Toby were leaving Central Park that afternoon, Tom Keeley was bypassing New York on Interstate 95, surrounded by his family and discussing nothing more strenuous than how much further there was to go to their new home in New Canaan, Connecticut. Thirty years would go by before he had occasion to wonder again about that day. And to speculate about what might have happened if the dice had taken one more roll and placed him with the others on the path circling what is today known as the Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis Reservoir.

  16 | Too much reality

  Further talk was impossible as the Lexington Avenue train battled its way under Manhattan. Hélène and Seema were seated opposite each other, Michael in one corner, Toby and Stephen strap-hanging. Occasionally eyes met, connecting for a moment their inner silences across the relentless, ricocheting noise. For each of them, half a lifetime of experience was being brought to bear on what they had to decide that day, but common to them all was the dawning sense that circumstance had somehow stripped away the carapace of heart and mind that makes it possible for most of us, most of the time, to ignore the larger realities of the world.

  It was Hélène who had scraped away the first layer by insisting that those millions of children were all individual boys and girls, each as loved and precious as any child in Europe or North America. That such an obvious truth needed acknowledgment was in itself testimony to the power of the carapace; but with that truth out in the open a layer of protection was gone. Michael had peeled off the next layer; the comforting assumption that the tragedy of millions of deaths was something that could only be righted by the long, slow struggle against poverty. He had said that it could all be prevented now, by means that were available and affordable today. All of them knew that no one in the world was better qualified to make such a call. And another piece of the carapace was gone.

  Perhaps even this would not have been enough if the last layer of protection – the layer that says ‘there’s nothing I can do’ – had not also been ripped away by what Michael had produced from his Gladstone bag the previous evening.

  All this is not to deny the usefulness of the carapace. Humankind cannot, indeed, bear very much reality, and for ordinary human beings to function there have to be limits on what they are prepared to face up to, empathize with. And so the carapace ensures that few are called upon to make a decision like the one that faced the two women and three men riding the Lexington Avenue subway that Saturday afternoon on the last day of January, 1980.

  Each was also aware, as the long, hollow melancholy roar of the train carried them ever closer to Union Square, that the journey of decision making they were embarked upon was not a journey of reason alone. In the inner silence beneath the swaying bedlam, each knew that they were wandering the labyrinths of the mind where reason is curdled with instinct and emotion, where cowardice and inhibition tangle with courage and the yearnings of conscience, and where fathomless genetic predispositions interact with all that life has taught and brought.

  For Hélène, facing Toby but screened from him by bodies in windbreakers and overcoats, the process was freighted with all the accumulated frustrations of the years, the anger undischarged, the shame at past avoidances, the fierce desire to break through the callous crust of inertia and corruption. She glanced up at Michael. She had provoked him to this, she knew. And there was no way she would abandon him now. Nor could she shrink from the only opportunity there might ever be to stand shoulder to shoulder with that other man whose ghost was riding the subway with her that day. The yearning to honour his memory, to be worthy of the love they had had, to live up to the ideals they had shared, was already making up her mind.

  For Stephen, hanging from a strap in the centre of the carriage, the confusion was perhaps greatest. He had attempted to make reason and objectivity the hallmarks of his sheltered life. But beneath his brittle determinations, he too was aware that reason was ensnared by pettier concerns: by the self-image that he clung to as a life-raft in the seas of not knowing who he was; by some unarticulated need to redeem himself, to be somebody in the world’s overwhelming anonymity. It was easier to think of other things, and for a time he was able to tame any inner shame by translating such thoughts onto a more abstract plain, reminding himself of Althusser’s argument that even philosophers do not live in the realm of pure reason but are combatants in ‘the only war without memoirs or memorials, the war hum
anity pretends it has never declared, the war it always thinks it has won in advance, simply because being human is nothing but surviving this war’.

  Seema, sitting cold and troubled, struggled to stop her eyes from straying to Michael, the man she thought she had known. Instead, she looked across the carriage at Hélène and knew that her friend’s decision was already made. Toby’s too. And Stephen’s, of course. Her eyes finally found Michael. And the look that passed between them was so disturbed and confused, so full of history and hurt and hope, as to defy any steady interpretation. She had so firmly resolved not to risk hurting him again, and so had not allowed herself the smallest transparency. And now this. Which made any other preoccupation seem trivial, even shameful. The tiled blur of 28th Street flashed by and she closed her eyes, allowing herself to believe in a moment of weakness that this was not really happening, that they would emerge into Union Square and she would take his arm and the world would be normal again. Eyes closed against the roar of the train, she tried once more to get back on track, think objectively, but was soon derailed by the thought that this might be the one chance she would ever have to address the vague, long-standing tensions of her own life: her subcurrent of guilt; her nagging sense of a lack of any real engagement outside of a library or a lecture theatre. She opened her eyes as she sensed the train beginning to slow, ashamed that the processes of reason had been so easily suborned. Toby was right. Their own individual concerns should be weightless in the scales of what was now before them.

  Not even for Michael, who had given up his seat after 59th Street, was there to be immunity. Of the five, he was the only one who had had time to consider at length. Yet he too knew that illegitimate considerations had entered the mix. Knew, too, that those considerations were centred on the slight figure who was at this moment seated only a few feet away amid all the noise and the charged, dirty, electric smell of the New York subway. It was for this reason that he decided if he could not persuade her then he would retreat. And that was the strap that he clung to now as he tried to avoid looking too often at Seema Mir. He turned instead towards Toby, who was reading a leaflet about transcendental meditation that someone had handed to him as they had boarded the train.