Saigon (81 page)

Joseph stared at her blankly and said nothing. 

“My car’s outside,” said Tempe softly. “I’ll drive you there if you want.” 

Senator Nathaniel Sherman lay dying in the Robert E. Lee bed when Joseph and Tempe arrived at the plantation house overlooking the James River just after live o’clock in the morning. The left side of his body had become partially paralyzed as a result of the stroke, and his face had been affected, but he had remained aware enough of his surroundings to order the household staff to carry him to the east river view bedroom and put him in the historic four-poster in which the celebrated Confederate general had often slept. 

“Taking his chance to play to the gallery for the last time, I suppose,” commented Joseph grimly when his sister, Susannah, who greeted him at the door, directed him up the great staircase of carved walnut. 

Susannah had frowned even while embracing him, then she’d led Tempe away to the drawing room so that he could go up alone. Although the news that his father was dying had not moved him unduly in Washington, the sight of the stricken body propped up on a bank of white pillows in the canopied bed shocked him when he entered the room. The old man’s eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, hut the stroke had dragged down the left side of his face, making it grotesque; his cheeks were shrunken yellow hollows, and in comparison the old tentacles of scar tissue from the hunting accident stood out white and livid on his face and neck in the dull glow of a single bedside lamp. To Joseph they looked like grasping fingers spreading up from the wound that had severed his left arm, and the new facial disfigurement on that same side made him think that whatever malevolent force had inflicted the original injuries was flow reaching out to snatch away the Final prize that had eluded it SO many years before. 

Joseph shuddered at the thought and sat down on a chair already in place beside the bed; the nurse who had been on duty in the room tiptoed out, closing the door soundlessly behind her, and as he sat alone staring at the piteously sunken face, he wasn’t surprised to find that the natural compassion he would have felt for any dying man was mixed, in the case of his own father, with feelings of anger. The memory of their hitter clash on television only months before was still painfully fresh in his mind and a clear sight of the hunting scars brought back with surprising force the sense of outrage he’d experienced on learning the true story behind Chuck’s death. 

During the drive from Washington, lie had wondered several times whether he would find his father conscious; he had wondered, too, whether lie would have one last chance to do what he had always failed to do before, confront him with his knowledge of Chuck’s death. He had always felt vaguely that he owed it to Chuck, to the memory of his courage and good sense, to force some admission of guilt or regret from his father, and his failure to act on this impulse over the years had sometimes weighed heavily on his conscience. In the coldest moments of his anger he had also contemplated revealing the truth about Guy — but loyalty to his dead mother and the promise he’d made her had always stopped him. As the minutes ticked by at the bedside, he found himself wondering again whether he would have the courage to speak the truth if the dying man regained consciousness. 

Lost in his own thoughts, Joseph failed at first to notice when his father’s eyes opened, and it was the sound of his trying to speak that brought him back to the present with a start. Then he saw that his left eyelid, because of the paralysis, drooped over the iris, forcing him to squint at him with his right eye. The left side of his mouth drooped too, making clear speech difficult, and his first words were strangled and incoherent. 

‘Don’t try to talk,” said Joseph quietly. He was appalled by the disintegration taking place before his eyes, and he searched his mind frantically for some shred of comfort that he might offer. “Trust you to take to the old Robert E. Lee,” he said, forcing a smile to his lips. “I guess you figured they’ll have to rename it the ‘Nathaniel Sherman Bed’ now, huh?” 

He didn’t think his words had been heard at first, but suddenly the misshapen features on the snowy pillow lit up with an expression of delight and the head nodded feebly in agreement; then the smile faded as soon as it had come. “I’m going, Joseph. 

I know it.” His speech was still slurred, but by bending closer, Joseph could make out his meaning. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.” He lifted his remaining hand slowly from beneath the sheet and held it towards him, and Joseph took it reluctantly in both his own. “We’ve had our differences, Joseph,” he continued in a croaking voice, “but I asked you to come because I wanted you to know . . . before I go, that I don’t hold it against you . . . for disagreeing with me in public. . . There’s no bad blood. . I didn’t want you to have that on your conscience.” 

Joseph stared wonderingly at his father. The fingers of his hand felt cold and limp, as if they might already be dead, but even the imminence of death had not dented the senator’s unassailable arrogance. He had called him to his deathbed to offer forgiveness when he himself had condemned his own son in public with unpardonable and illogical bitterness. 

“We’ve always had our differences, Father,” said Joseph grimly. 

The dying man nodded, gazing back at him with the one rheumy eye. “You were always different from Chuck and Guy. 

More sensitive, I guess . . . mole like your mother. . . You always seemed far away from me.” The cold hand twitched weakly in Joseph’s grasp. “But you’re strong in other ways. You’re the only one who’s survived. Chuck and Guy are dead. 

Joseph saw his chance and leaned closer suddenly. “Has the burden of Chuck’s death been hard for you to bear all these years?” 

The good eye fell closed, and for a moment the senator’s ragged breathing was the only sound in the room. “I tried to save him. ... I did everything I could. The eyelid fluttered and the exposed eye gazed blearily at him. “You know that, Joseph, don’t you?” 

Joseph gazed back at his father in disbelief; then after a moment he turned his face away towards the uncurtained window. “Chuck had what it takes He was strong. . . so damned strong and determined . . . he had the will to succeed — that’s why his death was such a terrible loss. Never forget that, Joseph, will you? I guess he was a little headstrong . . . Like his old father 

Like his brother Guy. . . But that’s not the worst fault a man can have, I don’t reckon.” 

His voice was rambling, rising and falling on each painful breath, and Joseph, feeling the anger in him reach a new peak, let go of his father’s hand and stood up. “You’re wrong to compare Chuck with Guy,” he said in a whisper so fierce that it caused the dying face to turn quickly towards him. “You’re more wrong than you’ve ever known.” 

The solitary eye regarded Joseph directly for a moment, then seemed to cloud over. “I know . . . I know .. . You don’t have to tell me that, Joseph.. . there was never anybody to touch Chuck, was there? Nobody at all!” 

A grimace of pain contorted his face suddenly and his head began rolling back and forth on the pillow. As he watched his father suffering his death agonies, Joseph felt the anger rush out of him like air from a deflated balloon, and the urge to wound was replaced in the same instant by an intense feeling of pity Nathaniel Sherman had misled others lot so long about his role in the death of his favorite son that in the end he might even have come to believe his own lies. Perhaps he’d had to do that to make his grief bearable, thought Joseph, hut either way he remained impregnable behind the walls of his own illusions, as lonely and isolated as he lay dying as he had been all his life in the midst of his own family. 

As he stood watching life fade from the stricken body, another thought struck Joseph with sickening force: he was not so different himself from the man he had been at odds with all his life. He had imagined himself wronged and misunderstood as a boy by a blind, insensitive father who had continued to see life simply through the eyes of ancestors who had tamed the raw, wild lands of America by unrelenting physical determination. He had always imagined that his own more sensitive nature was superior, yet he too in his turn had set his own sons and his bi-other Guy against himself; his owrfoo1ish romantic idealism had led him to believe that nothing was impossible if a man responded honestly to the innermost urgings of his soul, if he set his love of truth above all things — hut these beliefs had brought disaster on himself in his own life that had exceeded even the scale of his father’s. 

Saddened more by these thoughts than by his father’s imminent death, Joseph turned his back on the bed suddenly and walked across the room to the window. For a long time he stood looking out over the darkened boxwood lawns towards the river; the night was moonless but light from the uncurtained window on the ground floor cast a faint glow into the garden, and as his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness he fancied he saw someone moving among the trees. But although he stared hard into the shadows, he couldn’t be certain the light hadn’t played a trick on him. 

Standing there, he remembered how only two or three hours before he had stood beside another bed in Georgetown looking down at the face of his only surviving son who was as lost and remote from him now as his dying father, and he shivered involuntarily; dimly he became aware that in the four-poster behind him, the passage of air in and out of his father’s lungs was becoming more noisy and labored, but something prevented him from turning around. Then a long, harsh, high-pitched scream split the darkness of the garden outside and Joseph recoiled instinctively as a dark shape rose from the blackness of the box- woods and soared upwards, passing close across the face of the window. The peacock screamed again as it settled on the chimney stack above the room, and its repeated cries rang eerily in the flue that rose from the big fireplace beside the bed. A shower of soot tumbled noisily into the hearth, and Joseph heard clearly the dry rattling sound of the peacock spreading the spines of its tail on the chimney top. 

A moment later the rhythm of his father’s breathing was interrupted suddenly; a long choking cough racked him and his breath gurgled loudly in his throat like water. Joseph rushed to the bedside, fell to his knees and seized the old man’s hand again; the desire to utter some final words of consolation welled up in him with such force that tears started to his eyes — but he gazed in vain into the face that was now clenched and contorted in agony. Clearly beyond hearing or seeing, the senator’s whole frame was trembling; then abruptly all movement ceased and the spent, white body seemed to sink and melt into the snowy pillows. 

Joseph remained motionless on his knees beside the bed for a minute or two, holding the limp lifeless hand; then he rose and walked quietly to the door. On the landing outside he found Tempe waiting with one hand pressed to her mouth. 

“What was that awful noise, Joseph?” she asked in a horrified whisper. 

“Just one of the peacocks flying up to the chimney.” He reached out and took her hand, relieved to find it warm to his touch. “There’s nothing to worry about — he’s gone.” 

Richard Nixon won the presidential election of November 1968 largely on the strength of his campaign pledge to “end the war and win the peace” in Vietnam. This promise seemed highly attractive to an American nation that had been deeply shocked by the scale of the Tet Offensive the previous February; the Communist offensive, because it exploded the myth that the war was being won, left President Johnson’s Vietnam policies in ruins and contributed directly to his decision not to run again for the presidency, but during the four years of his first term, President Nixon used his ambiguous campaign pledge to spread and escalate the war against Communism in Indochina. He ordered brief invasions of Cambodia and Laos, bombed those two countries over a longer period, resumed the bombing of North Vietnam halted by President Johnson, and eventually mined the approaches to the harbor of Haiphong in an attempt to stop seaborne supplies from the Soviet Union reaching North Vietnam. To pacify public opinion while intensifying the war in these new directions, he scaled down the country’s direct involvement by gradually withdrawing American ground troops from Vietnam and arming, supplying and training a greatly expanded South Vietnamese army — a policy he called “Vietnamization.” Contrived to satisfy both “doves” and “hawks” alike, this policy gradually cooled the passions of the most fervent antiwar protesters — those students who feared they would be drafted to Vietnam if the war continued until their deferments expired. In March 1969, some 540,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam, but this peak figure was reduced by stages until only 27,000 “advisers” remained at the end of 1972. The policy of “Vietnamization” expanded President Thieu’s army to a strength of more than a million men and increased the flood of American money and war materials into Saigon, but this did nothing to solve the chronic political and social problems that made South Vietnam so vulnerable to a Communist takeover; the new enlarged army was seen by the largely peasant population as a bigger and better force for terror and oppression, and the increased flow of aid led to greater corruption among the country’s military rulers. The invasions of Cambodia and Laos in 1970 and 1971 by mixed American and South Vietnamese forces were designed to strike at Communist bases and supply routes, but neither met with much success; the large-scale bombing of these two countries bordering Vietnam also had tragic results, killing unknown numbers of their peasants, turning millions into refugees and ultimately hastening their fall to Communism in 1975. Although President Nixon succeeded in extracting American ground forces from the conflict step by step, 20,000 American fighting men were killed in Vietnam while he was commander in chief, and in the first two years of his presidency he dropped more bombs on Indochina than the United States had dropped in Europe and the Pacific in World War II. By May 1972 some three thousand tons of bombs were falling each day on Indochina at a daily cost of $20 million — but still the war dragged on. By then the remaining American troops fought only with great reluctance; drug-taking became rife in the ranks, and officers were 
frequently attacked by enlisted men with fragmentation grenades. The soldiers’ attitudes were conditioned by the growing mood of disenchantment with the war at home which had been heightened dramatically by two separate events — the revelation in November 1969 that three hundred Vietnamese civilians had been massacred eighteen months earlier by American troops at the village of My Lai, and the publication in the summer of 1971 of leaked secret documents which became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers were a detailed government study of American involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1968, and they revealed most dramatically the extent of President Kennedy’s intervention in the plot to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem, and the dubious background to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which, it became clear, had been prepared in advance of the North Vietnamese attacks of August 1964 to give President Johnson a free hand to make war in Vietnam without a formal war declaration. Above all, the Pentagon Papers were a staggering catalogue of how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had deliberately deceived the American people over Vietnam and they turned public attention increasingly to the long-drawn-out peace talks which had begun in Paris in May 1968. Elaborate and infinitely complex, the negotiations, which were to last five years, were often used by both sides for propaganda purposes, but they always centered around one issue: who should govern in Saigon. What began as talks between American and North Vietnamese diplomats were expanded later to include representatives of President Thieu’s government and the National Liberation Front but something akin to a permanent stalemate was quickly reached; Hanoi and the Liberation Front demanded as their price for peace a complete American withdrawal and representation for the Front in a coalition government in South Vietnam, but President Thieu refused to countenance the idea of a coalition. As the talking continued inconclusively in Paris, the war went on, and in the spring of 1972, General Vo Nguyen Giap pushed three of North Vietnam’s best divisions into South Vietnam supported by tanks and artillery. In response to this new offensive, President Nixon ordered giant American B-52 bombers to attack the regions around Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time since 1968 and he also seeded the Gulf of Tongking with mines to blockade Haiphong Harbor. The Communist thrust into South Vietnam lost momentum as a result and eventually the renewed American bombing and the mining of Haiphong forced the Communist leadership in Hanoi to modify their peace demands. In early October 1972 they dropped their insistence that the National Liberation Front be included immediately in a coalition government in Saigon; instead, in return for a cease-fire and an American withdrawal, they proposed that the government of President Thieu should continue temporarily in office while a joint “Council of National Reconciliation” discussed the problems of cooperation in the South. With the American presidential election due in November, President Nixon and his National Security Adviser. Dr. Henry Kissinger, were anxious to clinch an early agreement but President Thieu denounced the new proposals as a ‘disguised coalition” and refused to cooperate. Despite this setback, a partial bombing halt was observed by the United States in response and Dr. Kissinger ringingly declared that peace was “at hand” during a dramatic press conference in Washington on October 26. Two weeks later, on a wave of peace optimism, President Nixon was reelected for a second term by a landslide majority, but when the talks in Paris were resumed shortly after the election, they foundered again without any clear explanation being given as to what was holding up an agreement. President Nixon’s critics promptly accused him of exploiting the peace talks for his own electoral advantage, and when the delegates began reassembling once more at the beginning of December in the anonymous villas in the suburbs of Paris where they had met over the years, there was an unprecedented mood of tension and expectation among the journalists waiting in the wintry streets outside. Their thoughts, like those of the delegates, were turned to peace, and with Christmas approaching, few of them anticipated the bloody act of wholesale destruction that would be carried out before American forces finally bowed out of Vietnam.