Memories of the Ford Administration (46 page)

The next day, Buchanan held his customary New Year’s Day reception at the White House, braving assassination rumors and enduring snubs from secessionist guests. For the last time, the Southern flower of Washington society savored what Nevins evokes as
the contrast between the tall, snowy-haired, black-garbed old President, standing with head slightly awry, and the statuesque, golden young woman by his side
. On the second day of the new year, a reply was received from the Commissioners which the Cabinet, even Thompson concurring, found
violent, unfounded and disrespectful
. There had been a number of unpleasant letters in Buchanan’s life—that from Dr. Davidson to his father concerning his misbehavior at Dickinson College, for example, and the lost letter from Ann Coleman breaking their engagement, and the preserved letter of his own, begging to attend her funeral, which was returned
unopened, and the letter from Duff Green in 1826 asking,
Will you, upon the receipt of this, write to me and explain the causes which induced you to see Genl. Jackson upon the subject of the vote of Mr. Clay & his friends a few days before it was known that they had conclusively determined to vote for Mr. Adams; also advise me of the manner in which you would prefer that subject to be brought before the people
. That letter had had to be answered; it was Buchanan’s pleasure to return this one to the Commissioners, with the endorsement,
This paper, just presented to the President, is of such a character that he declines to receive it
.

Philip F. Thomas, the Marylander who with Thompson composed the dwindling Southern contingent in the Cabinet, remembered in 1881 Buchanan’s saying, of the letter, “Let it be returned” but did not hear him say, “Reinforcements shall now be sent.” Holt, Toucey, Stanton, and Buchanan himself (in his letter to Thompson of January 9, 1861) testified that the President, once the decision to return the letter had been reached, then said audibly, “It is now all over, and reinforcements must be sent.” But Thompson, like Thomas, didn’t hear him say it, and resigned with considerable show of indignation when he discovered, on January 8, 1861, that the light-draught (in order to pass over the sunk vessels blocking the harbor) steamer
Star of the West
had, to quote his letter of resignation,
sailed from New York on last Saturday night with Two Hundred and fifty men under Lieut. Bartlett, bound for Fort Sumter
.

“It is now all over, and reinforcements must be sent.”

It was now all over. The South and Buchanan had parted.

The last thing I remember about the Ford Administration is sitting with my children watching, while a New England
January held us snug indoors, a youngish-seeming man walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with one hand in his wife’s and the other waving to the multitudes. Washington City was bathed in telegenic white sunlight and Carter was hatless, in pointed and rather embarrassing echo of Kennedy fourteen years and four Presidents ago. A hundred years after the end of Reconstruction and the one indisputably fraudulent Presidential election in American history, a son of the South had risen, without benefit of (cf. Truman, Tyler, and the two Johnsons) another President’s demise. The youngish, hatless man’s smile was broad and constant but not, absolutely, convincing; we were in a time, as in the stretch between Polk and Lincoln, of unconvincing Presidents. But Polk and Lincoln, too, had their doubters and mockers and haters by the millions; perhaps it lies among the President’s many responsibilities to
be
unconvincing, to set before us, at an apex of visibility, an illustration of how far short of perfection must fall even the most conscientious application to duty and the most cunning solicitation of selfish interests, throwing us back upon the essential American axiom that no divinely appointed leader will save us, we must do it on our own. Of all the forty-odd, handsome Warren Harding was in a sense the noblest, for only he, upon being notified that he had done a bad job, had the grace to die of a broken heart.

In the three fuzzy heads around me—no, I miscounted, there can be only two, Andy is off at college by January of 1977, he is eighteen and in his freshman year; he chose to go to Duke, to put a bit of distance between himself and his wayward parents—there was, if I can be trusted to read the minds of children, a dubiety not unlike my own at the sunny spectacle being beamed to us from the District of Columbia. No other President had ever seen fit to walk back from the inauguration
to the White House. It made him, we felt, a bit too much like the circus clown who, with painted smile, jesting now in this direction and now in that, leads the parade into the big tent—the acrobats and the jugglers, the solemn elephants of foreign policy and the caged tigers of domestic distress.

“Showoff,” Buzzy said, in his manly baritone, which I was still not quite used to.

“Suppose he gets shot?” Daphne asked. She had been in my lap, up in our apple-green home at Dartmouth, a few months old, the Sunday that Lee Harvey Oswald had been plugged for his sins on national television. She had been weaned, you might say, on assassination.

However much Carter wanted to be liked, we could not quite like him: the South couldn’t quite like him because he was a liberal and an engineer, the Northeast liberals couldn’t because he was a Southerner and a born-again Christian, the Christians were put off because he had told
Playboy
he had
looked upon a lot of women with lust
, and the common masses because his lips were too fat and he talked like a squirrel nibbling an acorn. Blacks liked him, those blacks who still took any interest in the national establishment, but this worked in his disfavor, since the blacks were more and more seen as citizens of a floating Welfare State concealed within the other fifty, and whose settled purpose and policy was to steal money from hard-working taxpayers. Carter and the other liberal Democrats were white accomplices to this theft, this free ride. Furthermore he told us things we didn’t want to hear: We should turn our thermostats down and our other cheek to the Iranians. Our hearts were full of lust, we were suffering from a
malaise
. All true, but truth isn’t what we want from Presidents. We have historians for that.

Forgive me, NNEAAH, and editors of
Retrospect;
I’ve not forgotten it was Ford you requested my impressions of, not Carter. But what did Ford
do
? As I’ve said, I was preoccupied by personal affairs, and had the radio in my little apartment turned to WADM—all classical, with newsbreaks on the hour of only a minute or two.
^m
As far as I could tell, Ford was doing everything right—he got the
Mayaguez
back from the Cambodians, evacuated from Vietnam our embassy staff and hangers-on (literally: there were pictures of people clinging to the helicopter skids in the newsmagazines in my dentist’s office), went to Helsinki to meet Brezhnev and sign some peaceable accords, slowly won out over inflation and recession, restored confidence in the Presidency, and pardoned Nixon, which saved the nation a mess of recrimination and legal expense. As far as I know, he was perfect, which can be said of no other President since James Monroe. Further, he was the only President to preside with a name completely different from the one he was given at birth—Leslie King, Jr. “President King” would have been an awkward oxymoron.

There was a picturesque little layer of snow in Washington on television, so there must have been mounds of it in New Hampshire, and ice in the river, black and creaky, and bare twigs making a lace at the windows. Twigs. Our nest. Where was Norma? My still regnant Queen of Disorder? Not within
the frame of this memory, somehow. She could have been painting in her alluringly odoriferous studio, or drifting through one of her do-it-yourself lectures on art appreciation over at the college, but my memory places her in the kitchen, tossing together a meal for us all as she sips her lucid green vermouth, the same tint as her eyes. But wait—the 20th of January was a Thursday, according to my perpetual calendar, so Buzzy and Daphne must have been at school, puzzling their way through the post-noon lessons, or gobbling up the beef-barley soup and American chop suey the school cafeteria provides on Thursdays. Perhaps we were all watching Carter’s stroll on the evening-news rerun, and Norma was in the kitchen, cooking our dinner. She wandered in to join us. She held against the bib of her apron a curved wooden sculpting tool, with a serrated edge, that she used as a stew stirrer. She looked over our shoulders and said, “After Watergate, I don’t see how the Republicans will ever elect another President.”

This may have been the only thing I ever heard her say that was not even somewhat true. Now memory jump-shifts us to the kitchen, just the two of us, amid the soft sizzle and bubble of a meal minutes from consumption. I possibly whispered, “How do you think they seem?”

“Who?” The hand, winter-chapped and rather red and broad compared to Genevieve’s, that was holding the gravy-stained modelling tool pushed a bothersome wiggle of hair back from her forehead, and to keep it in place—an ineffective trick of hers I had forgotten—Norma blew sharply upward, from a protruded lower lip.

“The
chil
dren, of course,” I said. “Now that I’m back. They don’t seem especially grateful.”

“Oh, Alf, they
are
, they’re thrilled. They just can’t express it all the time, every minute. But Daphne is very happy, and is
sleeping much better. All the time you were gone, she had insomnia. She was worried you’d get robbed and murdered over there in that slum.”

“It wasn’t a slum. It was an old-fashioned blue-collar downtown. And Buzzy? Are his marks going up?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s too early to tell. They just got back from Christmas vacation.”

“And you? You, dear Norma?”

She sensed my need and came a step closer to me, there among the sizzling and bubbling. “Of course. Very happy,” she said, but with an undercurrent of diffidence, I thought. “You’ve made an honest woman of me again.” Meaning she had stopped sleeping with the men who had moved into the vacuum I had left. “Though I must say” (like Carter, she was a touch too honest) “it takes some readjustment after all that—what did the existentialists call it?—dreadful freedom.” When she and I and our generation are all dead, who will remember the existentialists? Who will break their eyeballs on Heidegger and Sartre and try to grasp the priority of existence over essence and the towering, eggplant-colored mystery of
Dasein
? What generation will ever again frame these basic questions in non-electronic terms? “One
does
adjust, awful to admit,” Norma concluded, meaning, I took it, to sleeping around.

“Well,” I said, indignantly, “if you’d adjusted a little faster I wouldn’t have had to give up Genevieve.”

“Oh, so that’s my rap, is it?” Her hair against the light from the kitchen windows (it has become afternoon again) showed a rim of the palest apricot color; her green eyes, rounded in anger, held thin flecks of gold in their green. “You two did it to yourselves. I didn’t ask you to come back. Love us or leave us, you had your choice. Alf, you were so dithery she had to
take measures to protect herself. Brent made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. If he’d have asked
me
to go to Yale with him, I might have said yes, too.”

“With that anti-intellectual intellectual shit? Now you’re kidding me. Now you’re
trying
to hurt my feelings.” To show this was a joke, I laughed.

Thus we patched it up, again and again, until the ground became tired, trod into dust, beneath further discussion but not, really, ever not there.

In truth I was disappointed that my family didn’t rejoice more loudly over my return. I could not quite fill the vacuum I had created when I left, as if I had grown smaller while away. And the days, the interminable dailiness of my being back, dulled the shining edge of my re-emergence on the domestic scene. Real life is in essence anti-climactic.
Star of the West
, for instance, whose dispatch to Sumter with reinforcements climaxed a long struggle within the Buchanan Administration, arrived at Charleston Harbor the day after Jacob Thompson resigned, and failed to return cannon fire from South Carolina batteries on Morris Island. The
Star
, unlike the warship
Brooklyn
, for which General Scott, against Buchanan’s better judgment, had substituted the
Star
, had no guns on board and could not fire back. Nor did gunfire come from the
Brooklyn
, which had followed, at exactly what distance history does not record; objects bigger than a battleship can slip through its fingers. Major Anderson, who had received no orders and heard only rumors of the
Star
’s approach, did not answer with Fort Sumter’s batteries. The
Star
returned to New York; an informal truce between Governor Pickens and Major Anderson took effect; and the flashpoint in Charleston Harbor was left unignited until after Lincoln had taken office and for a full month had sustained Buchanan’s policy of not supplying Anderson
until he asked for aid. On April 12, 1861, as we of the NNEAAH all know, Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard gave the order to fire, and fanatic old fire-eating Edmund Ruffin pulled the lanyard for the first cannon-shot, according to a debatable but indelible legend. Although Major Anderson after thirty-three hours of bombardment surrendered without losing a man, the great bloodbath was on. Buchanan was back in Wheatland, and stayed there, defended by his brother Masons from local threats of violence, and defending himself with his pen against journalistic assaults on his Presidency. Crawford [see
this page
] in his 1887 edition reproduces, with the photographic means of the time, a letter Buchanan wrote to a John Griffin in June of 1862, stating in his always legible hand,
ⁿ
It will not be long before the public mind will be disabused of the slanders against me & I have not the least apprehension of the award of posterity. I would be the happiest old man in the country were it not for the civil war; but I console myself with the conviction that no act or omission of mine has produced this terrible calamity
. I love that:
the happiest old man in the country were it not for the civil war
. When Lee’s troops invaded Pennsylvania in 1863, Buchanan sent Harriet Lane to safety in Philadelphia but himself remained at Wheatland, awaiting what evil the day might bring. Unlike Black, he supported the necessity for war from the start; unlike Pierce, he
never spoke ill of Lincoln. Upon Lincoln’s assassination, he wrote a friend,
My intercourse with our deceased President, both on his visit to me after his arrival in Washington, and on the day of the first inauguration, convinced me that he was a man of kindly and benevolent heart and of plain, sincere and frank manners. I have never since changed my opinion of his character
. Harriet Lane married Edgar E. Johnston, of Baltimore, on January 11, 1866. James Buchanan died, at Wheatland, on the morning of June 1, 1868, at the age of seventy-seven. His last words were reported by Miss Hetty [see
this page
] to be
Oh Lord, God Almighty, as Thou wilt
. An accommodator to the end.