Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (40 page)

“Oh, hell, Buzz.
Plus ça change
,” I said. “I’ve never heard you argue with anybody.”

He gave me a defeated smile. “It wasn’t my personality, Pam. It’s because I was wearing a white shirt and they weren’t.”

At the brunch we threw in our Georgetown house to welcome the Warrens back from Athens that fall, Rich told us he was leaving USIS. “When a library’s just one more American thing for kids to throw rocks at, and you can’t blame them either? Well then.”

“But what will you and Laurel do?”

“Play our Coltrane and remember, what else?” he said. “All the same, we didn’t think we’d get old this young.”

Ned Finn unexpectedly stayed hawkish longest, but he had the disease. He’d spent three years as chief of political section in Berlin, where we were probably more unequivocally—and thanks to the Wall, literally—on the side of the right than anywhere else. Besides, the Ned Finnish drug of JFK’s
“Ich bin ein Berliner”
still lingered. Long-haired German students parading against our Asian war in streets protected by our troops had him gnashing his teeth and wanting a drink with Jayne Mansfield or somebody.

Knowing his vanities, I expect his only alternative would’ve been to eye braless Berlin girls bouncing alongside leonine-haired Berlin boys and feel helplessly past his prime. Once he was back at the Department, boozing hard even for him, the bunker mindset claimed another victim of the fallacy that knowing our government’s side of the story meant not knowing half but more.

Political romanticism takes many forms, Panama, and one of them is doggedness in the face of public incomprehension. Ned was plainly looking for the Galahad he’d left behind him, the reason I wonder how much headway Nan might have made if she’d just reminded him Jack Kennedy hardly drank at all and only smoked occasional cigars.

The future Mack McCork got off scot-free, since after Lisbon the nearest he came to Southeast Asia was a cushy posting in Tokyo. It was bound to give the worst of his temperament the upper hand, since men like him are all too apt to take Japanese decorum as reflecting a high estimate of them personally. The experience probably stood him in good stead when he came back to join Kissinger’s NSC staff, recently depleted by resignations over the invasion of Cambodia. A working knowledge of Japanese decorum has always been useful to anyone eager to express a high personal estimate of Henry.

When he left government after Carter’s election to take a job with Kissinger’s new consulting firm, old hands were disgusted. If acting the toady to Kissinger at the Department was something too many FSOs had to endure, volunteering for the same chore in the private sector declared preference rather than duty. Even though he only spent a few years in New York before Reagan’s inaugural pulled him back into the District’s web, none of us ever really considered him a career man after that. He was just a political appointee who’d spent a while trapped in a career man’s body.

As your dad knows even if you don’t, bikini girl, every last one of Mack McCork’s contributions to what even the Murphy Channel no longer calls a crusade has been dunderheaded. Putting him in charge of reconstruction over there made Katrina’s aftermath look like the Kirov’s
Swan Lake
,
and when they brought him back to NSC afterward, even courteous Andy Pond said, “Shi-
ite
. Let’s fold old Mack five ways and put him where the Sunnis don’t shine.”

He has the military expertise of a snowball, a grip of the region surpassed only by those who’ve watched
Lawrence of Arabia
even more times than he has—not that I’d bet Mack gets many chances to relish hearing himself called “McCork of Arabia” nowadays except when he’s shaving—and a gift of command shared only by the
no smoking
sign at an orgy. Somehow, in Potusville, that added up to an impressive range of knowledge. Only a man who didn’t have a clue about such a
lot
of tricky things was up to the job of masterminding our Iraq venture.

Nonetheless, Mack will end up in the history books. Not so your great-grandfather, Ned Finn, Andy, and too many others who spent half a century doing their best to uphold what he’s helped Potus blacken: the United States’ good name abroad. Discounting some academic studies so unreadably desiccated you’d swear they were written by mummies, Cadwaller never shows up even in the ones about Vietnam, despite his three years as head of the Department’s Policy Planning Staff.

One day in India, I asked if it bothered him that he hadn’t appeared in any so far. While mostly futile (python, snake house, etc.), Hopsie’s role hadn’t been dishonorable. Looking quizzical, he only said, “What are you talking about? I’m in all of them, dear.”

“You sure aren’t in this one,” I said, tossing whatever it was—Neil Halberd’s
Brightest in the Fire?
Gerald Francis Sheehan’s
Lake of Shining Lies?—
over to his end of the couch. Picking it up with a hum-what-have-we-here look, he wandered off to his study. Came back all of a minute later.

“Sometimes I don’t understand you, Pam. I’m right where I belong, as usual. I’m sure you’ll find me eventually.”

When I did, I laughed. “Hopsie, you mean sometimes I still don’t understand
you
,” I called to his closed door. In the margin of a random page, my husband had drawn a small top hat.

Posted by: Pam

When Cadwaller and I came back from Nagon to Washington in 1964, far from spotting anyone on the lookout for pythons, we were brushed and gilded on all sides by our sunny country’s belief the worst was over. We’d
had
our shock for the decade—Kennedy—but birds still sang and so, for children, did the Beatles. To us oldsters, the retrospective melancholy of that post-assassination reprise of optimism is that it didn’t feel naive but earned. We’d taken the worst punch fate could throw, yet here we were on our feet. Still in the ring when the next bell’s round rang, still America. Lyndon Johnson was popular
in New York City
.

That was when the District first became my home.
Regent’s
reporter Pam Buchanan had done her stints there back in the war, staying with Jake Cohnstein in his Kalorama apartment. Eyeing its kitchenette as you might eye Grendel’s cave, Pam Cadwaller had spent three months in drab Arlington housing while Hopsie prepared (Andy Pond’s Checker limo!) for his new Ambassadorship in West Africa. I’d never experienced the city as much more than a motel with monuments. Aside from India and our foreign trips later, I’ve now lived here forty-two years.

It was different in the way-back-when. The Kennedy Center was a hole in the ground, not the glowing white Gitmo of the arts it can feel like today when the opera’s too long and Roosevelt Island looks murkily worth swimming to over intermission wine. From just past the Treasury Building all the way to the base of Capitol Hill, the downtown streets off Pennsylvania Avenue were a clutter of clothing stores with prices on view in the window displays as if they’d been supermarkets, decrepit row houses, and a muzzy strew of bars no woman, black or white, would risk entering alone even in daytime—all swept away now by more commanding, squeaky-clean, safer but less flavorful renovation. The Metro only got built under Nixon and Ford, and we had a hard time believing as we made endless detours around the construction sites that
those
holes in the ground would ever amount to much.

Most blessedly of all, nothing was named for Ronald Reagan. Until I stopped flying, Pam made a point of growling “
National
Airport” at the necks of cabdrivers used to much worse. My prejudices on that score are nondenominational. As late as the Seventies, whenever I flew in or out of JFK, I’d be bothered that Jackie—of all people!—hadn’t been sensitive to the loss of the Clio Airways poetry of “Pan Am from Idlewild,” so truer to the tang of Jack’s manner. But like Constantinople, Leningrad, Nagon, West Berlin, and Stacy Finn’s mental health, Pan American Airlines no longer exists.

The now forgotten Thomas Wolfe to the contrary, I’m not sure only the dead know Brooklyn. Their inability or unwillingness to give street directions keeps the whole claim more or less moot. The only way to know Washington, D.C., is to roost here through multiple Presidencies, seven of them in my case before the final squalor of Chad Diebold renamed it Potusville. Old bags like me alternate between watching new productions of the same warhorse musical and madcap seasons when the latest artistic director smacks us out of the blue with Beckett, Pinter, or one of Sondheim’s more eccentric ones.

Over lunches at Martin’s or La Chaumière, we compare notes. The ingenue playing First Daughter this year has promise, but the Nixon staging’s swordfight was better. It stayed fun for a long time.

Literalizing the conceit, people actually sang “Hello, Lyndon” to the tune of “Hello, Dolly.” Herblock’s LBJ cartoons in the
WashPost
favored Ned Finn’s old standby
The Music Man
.
Oh, it was definitely a musical, was 1964—not just for the Beatles fans, but for us stodgier wights too. Driving the George Washington Parkway as the leaves turned, we’d hear our inner radios playing
The Fantasticks’
“Try to Remember.” Bliss it was to be alive, but to be middle-aged was very heaven.

Since Hopsie was now going to be singing the State Department equivalent of “Hello, Lyndon” to the President in person, I did feel obliged to confess to twenty-two-year-old Pam’s knee-trembler with then Congressman Johnson in his Capitol Hill office in 1942. In our few back-and-forths about earlier innings, the quickest lay of the 20th century hadn’t made the cut. I swear the reason was forgetfulness rather than shame or guile.

Cadwaller was never any damn good at getting perturbed about my doings before our marriage. “You’ll never stop delighting me. I never know how or when.” Then he frowned in the way I knew meant he was tickled. “You know, on the subject, I’m not sure I ever mentioned my other Pamela.”

“Other what, mister?”

“I was in England that same year. You never
saw
me in my Lieutenant Commander’s uniform, you know. I was reasonably dashing in a bald American way.”

“So what was the story with your other Pamela?”

“Once or twice she saw me out of it. Not much more to add.”

The pert Royal Navy Wren or fetching girl in Portsmouth I conjured up from the stereotype bin only gave way years later to someone less vague and more immediate.
“Hopsie!”
I boomed like a ceremonial cannon, turning to point one finger out our bay window
à la
Zola in the direction of a by then renowned Georgetown address. “You didn’t mean Pamela
Harrima—
”

“Oh, Pam, don’t be absurd. How could it have been? No woman by that name was known to anyone. Of course young Pamela Churchill was quite prominent.”

“Cadwaller, tell me!”

“Whoever she was, it was only a weekend. I don’t think she remembers. All I really got from it was a new word for the lexicon.”

“Well?”

His eyes crinkled. “Funsy.”

Posted by:
N
ot Pamela Harriman

Before his final months in office—of which more later, as the trad novelists say; sundown may keep me from describing the Taj Mahal’s increasingly inert grandeur on one’s twentieth trip there with a Congressional delegation, but only Potus on the elephone will stop
l’équipe
from getting to my White House
Piétas
here on plucky little daisysdaughter.com—I saw Lyndon Johnson only for a series of reception-line handshakes. If he recalled our encounter in the fall of ’42, those weren’t the occasions to reminisce about it. Anyhow, he always looked pretty glum in white tie. Texan enough to mistrust formal wear’s designs on him, he was nonetheless Promethean enough that his only yardstick for success would’ve been Fred Astaire.

What may surprise my readers (if any, if any! Can’t
somebody
post a comment? I’ve been at this since dawn, you bastards!) is that, with the retrospective exception of Franklin Roosevelt, LBJ was the only President of Pam’s lifetime whom I revered. Spare me your whimpers about that crisply jaunty Kennedy élan.

Some fools out there may think I favor style over substance. Prose and social life—my specialties—are two arenas where they’re Siamese twins, not Black Bart at odds with Sheriff Truegood. Not so American government, at least most of the time. Shove suave demeanor, say I. Get things done! Get things done!

Did he ever, and in the teeth of Washington’s Camelotic court in exile. The bitterest courtiers would’ve rather seen Saint Jack’s legacy wither on the Congressional vine than watch it rammed through into law with no elegance. East Coasters mocked him for his cottonmouth Hill Country accent, but which would you rather have, a President who prevented a new-kew-lear war? Or a dapper chap who called it “nucleah” and decided to start one?

In any case, to pretend that a man as volcanic, shrewd, alarmingly fragrant, opportunistically idealistic, holy and awful, vindictively generous and generously vindictive as Lyndon Johnson was
cornpone
just mixed spite with ignorance. It’s true I was never subjected to an LBJ tonguelashing, just quickly why-Henry’d once in my youth and then plunked down in front of Cronkite over twenty years later to enjoy legislation’s post-coital glow. But in ’64 and ’65, and even a lot of ’66, you may as well know I idolized him.

That made Cadwaller snort, not because he didn’t like Johnson. At the very least, Hopsie found him, let’s say, funsy, and he saw far more of the man than I did. He simply thought idolatry was a self-indulgence to wait on until someone was dead or at least out of office. Till then, he’d stay alert to contingencies.

While he was obviously right in the not-so-long run, I still think I got the better end of the deal. LBJ was my Beatles, and the (internally) squealing thrills of Pam’s two years of Lyndomania her most ecstatic experience of fandom. Previously not high on the to-do list outside marriage, as you may’ve noticed.

Callie Sherman disapproved, but hardly from Camelotic mopery. From her point of view, the
Kennedys
had been a bit common, with all that roughhouse touch football and wisecracking in public about their own gelt. Right she was too if you care, since all that kept her gimcrack American aristocracy able to believe it was one was agreement about the rules of engagement—or not—with the great unwashed. Her grudge at the voters after LBJ’s landslide election in his own right was that they’d retained a stablehand, understandably summoned in an emergency but nonetheless reeking of paddocks, to do the job of a butler.

At least the Shermans’ farmhouse out near Middleburg didn’t have one. Yes, that same equine spill of Virginia where Eileen Downslow still put the purr back in jodhpurs, though I never met her there or anywhere. We did see other horsewomen and horsemen here and there as we drove, but they weren’t playing polo and Tom Buchanan had been dead since 1925. I doubt I even thought of him.

Anyhow, Callie and Cy knew a Jeeves wouldn’t hit the right rustic note, so they settled for a handyman and a housekeeper. The handyman had the easiest job on the planet, since all he mostly had to do when they were there was wash their Cadillac in a rustic-looking way.

Cy was Deputy Under Secretary for something by then. Not yet transferred to Policy Planning, Hopsie was an Assistant Secretary, lower designation, in charge of the West African desk. Senior Department titles did have their Kabuki side; I’d tell you all about Assistant
Deputy
Under Secretaries if
l’équipe
had time.