(1964) The Man (63 page)

He looked up, and in the distance he could make out the Lincoln Memorial and the mass of the Pentagon Building behind it. Tonight he wished that he could see the White House half so clearly. He became aware that as he exhaled, his breath was condensing into visible clouds of vapor. Why the devil was Talley being so slow? Well, he told himself, it was not worth risking pneumonia to catch sight of his arrival.

He left the terrace for the heated interior of the eight floor, and then returned to the Madison Dining Room. As he entered, he saw Wayne Talley bustling in from the lounge, tugging off his camel’s hair overcoat, and dropping it and his hat across a chair.

“My God, Wayne, it’s about time.” Eaton tried to keep the peevishness out of his voice. “Where have you been?”

“The traffic,” said Talley breathlessly. “Even Moses couldn’t have made that sea of cars part, let alone a White House limousine.”

They met at the dining table. “What happened?” Eaton demanded. “Try to remember everything.”

“I wish there was much more to tell you besides what I told you on the phone, but there isn’t,” Talley said. “When I gave him the draft of the speech last night, I assured him I’d be waiting to consult with him on any changes. He said he was grateful, and I thought he was. I waited around in my office all morning, and not a word from him. After lunch I dropped in on Edna Foster and asked if the President had been looking for me. She said no, he was tied up. I asked if he had the speech on his desk. She said she thought she had seen it there. I told her to be sure to tell him I was standing by for any last-minute changes or modifications. She said she’d tell him. Well, the whole afternoon passed and not a word—”

“Didn’t you see Dilman at all today? I mean, on anything else?”

“Not even a glimpse of him.” Talley complained. “I think this is the first day that’s ever happened Well, about an hour ago I couldn’t stand it any more, so I went back to Miss Foster’s office and again I asked if he’d been looking for me. She said no, not as far as she knew. That was too much, so I said, ‘Edna I’d like to see the President.’ And she said—you know what she said?—she said, ‘I’m sorry, Governor Talley, but he canceled every one of his appointments and left strict orders not to be disturbed.’ How do you like that, Arthur? Well, I didn’t, not at all, so I said, ‘What in the heck is he so busy with?’ She said, ‘I really don’t know, except he’s been writing the entire morning and afternoon.’ Writing? That exasperated me—”

Eaton looked up from his watch crossly. “Governor, do you mind skipping your feelings and traumas, and sticking to what happened? In a few more minutes, we won’t be alone.”

Hurt, Talley said, “Geez, Arthur, I was only trying—okay, okay—so I said to her firmly, ‘Edna, I’m his aide, and if he knows I’m out here he will probably want to see me. So you go in there, you tell him I sent you in, and tell him I’d like to know what he thinks of the speech, and if he’d like to talk it over.’ She was kind of hesitant, but I insisted. So she went inside, and I cooled my heels for maybe a minute. Then she came out, and you know what she had in her hand? This.” Wayne Talley reached inside his suit coat and jerked forth the folded typescript of the speech they had jointly prepared for Dilman the night before, Talley opened it and pointed to the pen-written scrawl across the top.

Eaton cocked his head, squinted his eyes, trying to decipher the scrawl. Haltingly, he read the President’s notation aloud. “ ‘Thanks for all your trouble. D. D.’ ” Eaton frowned, and pursed his lips. “I wonder if he even read it.”

“I don’t know,” said Talley. “All I know is Miss Foster stuck it in my hands and said, ‘President Dilman asked me to tell you he appreciates this, the work that went into it, but he won’t need it because he’s writing his own speech.’ I was so appalled, I blurted out to her, I said, ‘Edna, for Chrissakes, no President in living memory has ever written his own speech. It takes writers, real writers, and in this instance, specialists in domestic matters. No man can do it alone. He’d botch it.’ And she said, ‘I don’t think you have to worry, Governor. He didn’t do it entirely alone. When I told him you were standing by to help, he said to tell you he’d had plenty of help all day long from friends of his.’ I got sore, and I said, ‘I thought you told me no one saw him today.’ She said, ‘That’s right, at least not through this office or Mr. Lucas’ office. But he may have seen someone in his own apartment at lunch. Besides, I didn’t say that no one
talked
to him today. There were plenty of telephone calls.’ I couldn’t ask her who he called or who called him, so I thanked her, double checked with Lucas to see if there’d been any visitors through his office—there weren’t—and then I hoped right back to my desk and telephoned you. That’s the whole of it, Arthur. What do you think?”

“I think I don’t like it, and I thin our President is a fool,” Eaton said. “He is liable to make a bloody mess of it. I can only pray he is literate and lucid enough to make the meaning and intent of the bill clear to the people.”

“Well, I’ve had time to cool off, and I’m becoming philosophical about the whole thing,” Talley said. “What difference what he says about it, as long as he signs it? I only resent his being so high-handed, and ignoring us. Besides”—Talley smoothed the typescript almost lovingly where it lay on the table—“it was such a damn beautiful bit of rhetoric, would have kicked the whole minorities program off in high. Christ, what T. C. could have done with this. Lookee here—”

He began to read snatches of the rejected speech. “ ‘This magnificent Federal program follows in the great American tradition of the WPA at home and the Marshall Plan abroad, both milestones in our democratic effort to lend a strong, undemanding hand to those of our citizens who need a hand, and to give aid and comfort to those millions who desire their country’s help even as they help themselves. It is with pride in my fellow citizens, and with the greatest confidence in our future well-being and security, that I endorse the Minorities Rehabilitation Program approved by our Congress, and that I put my name to it before all of you.’ ” Talley looked up. “Not bad, Arthur?” He dipped his head again. “I like this part best. ‘This bill, my fellow Americans, will stand as a monument more enduring than granite to the name and memory of my predecessor, the late President, who—’ ”

“That’s enough, Governor,” Eaton interrupted. “It’s a waste of time. It has as much meaning now as a letter that was never mailed.” He paused, and listened. “Is that the elevator?”

Quickly Talley folded the speech and shoved it into his pocket. He sidled up to Eaton. “What do we tell them?”

“Nothing, except that Dilman told you he was revising our draft at length, and we have no idea how he has altered the language.” He looked off. “Hello, Allan. . . . Evening, Senator—”

The Majority Leader of the Senate, John Selander, came into the room, followed by Allan Noyes, chairman of the Party. Minutes later, Gorden Oliver, full of cheer and carrying a bottle of Cutty Sark as his entry pass, arrived with Harvey Wickland, Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Shortly after, Secretary of the Interior Lionel Ruttenberg was the last to arrive.

Arthur Eaton found that he had no patience for the usual small talk and gossip, and he drifted apart from his guests to smoke and think. When he consulted his wristwatch, it was only three minutes to speech time.

He returned to the group, but hung back while Gorden Oliver finished the latest addition to his endless store of jokes.

“—stood waiting on the Montgomery street corner for his transportation,” Oliver was saying, “and when it came, this dark-skinned gentleman climbed on, paid his fare, and started to sit down in the front seat. Then the driver yelled at him, ‘Get in the back of the bus!’ Then the man said, ‘But I’m Jewish.’ Then the driver yelled, ‘Get off the bus!’ ”

They all roared with glee, and Oliver, encouraged, was about to embark on another story when Eaton said loudly, “The President is speaking in one minute. Let’s settle down.”

As Talley hastened to turn on the television set, find the clearest channel, adjust the volume, the others took their places in the semi-circle of chairs set before the screen. Eaton did not join them, but propped himself against the table edge, arms folded across his chest.

The television screen was filled by a commercial, and then the station break with the network’s emblem.

Senator Selander, tipping his chair backward, twisting, whispered to Eaton, “What’s this that Wayne was telling me about the President doing considerable rewriting on the address we prepared? I thought it was a gem. Are you sure you have no idea what parts he changed?”

“No idea whatsoever, Senator. Apparently it was a last-minute thing. In all probability, he beefed up the sections on civil rights. I think he’s trying to woo back his Negro following. But quite honestly, I don’t—” Eaton uncrossed his arms and pointed past Selander. “There it goes. We’ll know soon enough.”

They concentrated on the screen, which now showed the Presidential seal.

Eaton’s memory of the many times he had been in that Oval Office when T. C. had waited to address the nation enlarged the screen in his mind. A minute or two before, the still photographers had been shooed out, and what remained were four or five television cameras and their operators focusing on T. C.’s hearty figure, solid and ready in the big leather chair behind the Buchanan desk. Eaton remembered too, with an ache of nostalgia, the little things that prepared T. C. for this moment; the thick cables leading from the cameras across the rug and through the French doors to the colonnaded walk where the Secret Service men stood; the black drape hung and pinned across the windows behind the President; the brown felt cloth thrown over the desk from which the gadgets and framed photographs of Hesper and Freddie had been temporarily removed; the tilted stand atop the desk, holding the cards on which the President’s address had been typed; the two members of the press pool, sitting out of view at the President’s left; the television monitor set off screen at his right, but facing him so he could see the image that he was projecting; the two secretaries in the rear, holding transcripts of the speech, to check his spoken words against the printed words, and pencil in any changes he improvised or ad-libbed.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

The camera cut from the close-up of the Presidential seal to a full shot of the President behind his desk. And to Eaton’s surprise, he had succumbed completely to memory’s sorcery. For it was not T. C. who sat there at all, but a black stranger. The camera moved in until the screen was entirely occupied by Douglass Dilman’s broad African visage and features. These features, blended and made indistinguishable by his blackness, contrasted with the lightness of his suit and shirt, but matched the blackness of his hands resting on the sides of the stand. For the first time in many weeks, Eaton sensed his loss, the nation’s loss, and felt deeply embittered by the sheer insanity of human existence.

“Good evening, my fellow citizens.”

If not T. C., Eaton thought, then at least a reasonable facsimile. Thank the Lord, he thought, that all of them here were alive to see that T. C. would not be wholly dead.

By an effort of will, he ceased his thinking of what could not be. He listened. President Douglass Dilman was addressing the nation.

“One week ago there reached my desk the original enrolled bill, printed on parchment paper, certified and signed by the acting Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Acting President of the Senate, that has come to be popularly known as the Minorities Rehabilitation Program. It requires only the scratch of my pen to enact it into public law—or, on the other hand, it takes only my returning it unsigned to the House in which it originated, with my objectins stated, to institute a Presidential veto.

“To this date, I have neither approved the bill nor rejected it, because I have needed as much time as possible to consider every aspect of it, to weigh its cost against its value to all of us. Before rendering my decision, I felt it necessary to discuss briefly with you, the people, certain aspects of the bill, of this Minorities Rehabilitation Program.

“The preponderance of opinion is behind this program. Four out of five of your representatives in Congress are behind it. They are behind it, they say, because they feel that it will repay a minority of the population, largely Negro, for years of deprivation, it will restore economic dignity to those who have suffered loss of it because of their color, and it will bring a dramatic end to racial strife. Business leaders, as well as labor leaders, are behind it because they believe that the program will boost the national economy, bring prosperity to all, and bring civil peace to the land. Even the majority of Negro organization directors favor the bill as an expedient measure of restitution that would, to a degree, make up for losses suffered through a century of actual slavery and continued segregation thereafter.

“Without bothering to explore in detail every provision of the bill, and speaking to you in the plainest of language, what are the general arguments for and against the Minorities Rehabilitation Program?

“Those who want me to sign this bill—and they are, I repeat, the overwhelming majority—sincerely believe that by dispersing in various ways seven billion dollars of your tax payments, over a period of five years, to the underprivileged racial minorities of this nation, they will be bringing internal peace to the United States. They feel that the Federal government can now accomplish, by this massive outpouring of money, what the prejudices of private industry and restrictions of labor unions have heretofore prevented doing: close the economic gap between black and white. They feel that this financial restitution to the colored man will make up for a century of oppression. And they feel that, by giving twenty-three million of the nation’s blacks economic equality, by giving them higher wages, jobs or better jobs, subsidized training, by so occupying their minds and hands, by so filling their stomachs, they will have brought tranquility and order through the democratic process to the United States.