The Shadow Cabinet (10 page)

In addition, Angus McVey wasn't the dilettante described by the press. The youngest son of a Nova Scotia-born mining, timber, utilities, and shipping magnate, he was a millionaire several score over, but not a horseman. The Virginia estate had been owned by his second wife, who'd died in the early sixties. He wasn't an amateur scholar but a professional historian, had taken a doctorate at Harvard, where he'd taught for two painful years before he was forced to resign, victimized by that same morbid affliction which had blighted his youth, devastated his middle years, and finally driven him to the Virginia countryside; which made it physically impossible for him to speak in front of an audience, attend a dinner party with more than a half dozen guests present, mingle in any sort of crowd in which he was recognized, or even chair the annual meeting of the Center's board of directors. After he'd fled Harvard, he'd gone to Europe to spend two years in analysis, but had ended up working toward a medical degree in Berlin. Those years had helped him understand his affliction but not control it—the facial paralysis, the shriveled vocal cords, the hyperventilation, but most terribly of all the palsied hands and neck, tremors which inevitably produced spasms so grotesque that the Harvard undergraduates who'd witnessed them referred to him as Old Anguish McVey. Many were convinced he was an epileptic. But the hysteria or delirium to which he was prey had no physiological base. It was his struggle to understand those psychic demons within that led him from the dance of history to medicine and finally to psychohistory, two decades before the term passed into popular usage.

With the establishment of the Center, clinical psychiatrists might have concluded that McVey had achieved a kind of symbolic transference and found the peace for which he was searching. But there was no peace; the music played on, and the mad manic dance continued.

“I recall someone did raise the question of asking Nixon's collaboration,” McVey explained, rattling the bone china coffee cup to the saucer, eyes pathetically downcast, “but not for analysis. I recall that one of our consultant radiologists proposed a brain scan, an X-ray of the cerebellum, what they call a computerized axial tomography, but I didn't believe he was serious. He may have discussed it with someone else, outside the Center. Eventually it found its way into print, I regret to say.”

“So it wasn't for psychoanalysis at all,” Wilson said.

“Oh, no,” McVey responded quickly. “I doubt that analysis would have helped at all. I think most public figures reach a point where self-discovery is no longer possible. Any attempt at self-disclosure that required his cooperation would have been totally impossible. I would hope that he's found some peace of mind, Mr. Nixon, that he's rid himself of these self-disguises, but I'm not hopeful.” The tremors were fainter now, barely visible.

Dusk was creeping up the hill. The Virginia skyline was a purple seam across the tall windows. The fire clicked with dying heat beyond the brass fender.

“It might be that the endocrinologists could have drawn a useful portrait,” McVey added, eyes drawn to the cherry coals. “It seems clear that he was a pituitary-ridden individual with a fairly brisk adrenal development. Or so Dr. Foster thinks. There may have been some pathological complications.”

Wilson didn't understand what he was talking about. “Who is Dr. Foster?” he asked.

“The acting director of the Center. A historian, not a medical man at all, but he's very keen on endocrinology as a collateral tool in explaining behavior. It's still very primitive.”

Wilson asked about arms control and disarmament studies, and McVey admitted that the Center had done very little.

“I'm afraid we're a little behind the times these days,” he admitted, “a bit disorganized. We need to regroup, reorganize. Our Soviet studies were quite good in their time—Khrushchev, Brezhnev, most of the Politburo, Castro too at a very early stage—but now there's an entirely new set of problems emerging. Most of our behaviorist studies these days are for the National Institute of Health—”

“The Center's gotten off the track,” Donlon intruded. “The technicians have taken over.”

“The technological determinists,” McVey said. “Yes, this whole new class has emerged, men who are completely swallowed up by their technological or engineering disciplines but who have absolutely no sense of the historical or political context. Or even the moral one, for that matter. So we need to restructure, reorganize.”

“Angus would like you to take a look at the Center, talk to Dr. Foster, a few of the staff, and maybe make some recommendations,” Donlon said.

“If you're thinking about reorganizing,” Wilson said, “I know someone who could do a much better job. He's a natural.”

“Who is that?”

“Nick Straus.”

McVey looked to Ed Donlon for guidance, but Donlon shook his head. “Maybe a few years ago, but not now, no. Nick's stumbling over his shoestrings right now. I saw him last week getting off the Bluebird out at Langley with some bird colonel. I don't think he even remembered me. Anyway, he's over at DIA. Angus is talking about a six-month contract, maybe longer.”

“Why don't I take a look first,” Wilson said. “Then we can talk.”

“You might be interested in a monograph the Center prepared last spring,” McVey said, rising. “An in-house study for a colloquium the Center sponsored on the Persian Gulf. It was quite good. It shows the kind of problems the President faces these days.” He crossed to a small oak cabinet against the wall and opened a small drawer. “I don't have a copy here, but I had Carter index it.”

“The other Carter,” Donlon explained. “Carter, the in-house librarian.”

“It dealt with the Carter-Brzezinski relationship after the Afghanistan crisis,” McVey continued, warming to his subject. “The mobile deployment force, the new Carter doctrine, and so forth. Dr. Foster gave it a whimsical title, ‘Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz.' I suppose that defines rather well the relationship of the President to his national security adviser, doesn't it? At least until this present White House. You might ask Dr. Foster for a copy when you talk to him.” He closed the drawer, wrote the title and control number on a slip atop the cabinet, and handed it to Haven Wilson. “I find Dr. Brzezinski rather curious, typical of the problems we face, not at all like Kissinger, who resembles a male eunuchoid, but thymocentric as well. That's Dr. Foster's jargon, by the way. He's a student of Kissinger, but his analyses are often hard to follow. Brzezinski is far simpler.” McVey turned to Ed Donlon. “You've met Dr. Rankin, haven't you?”

“Just once.”

“Dr. Rankin has the Lenin letters. She and Foster didn't get along and I suggested she work out here. She's staying just down the hill. Shall we look in?”

“So you do studies on U.S. diplomatic personalities as well,” Wilson asked. “People like Kissinger and Brzezinski.”

“Oh, yes,” McVey said. “In these times, we must. I suppose they're much more important these days, much more important. It's the pathology we have to come to grips with, ours more than theirs.”

He led them through a rear door, across a tile-floored sun porch, and into a small mud room, where he removed the sheepskin slippers and pulled on another pair of high-top gum boots. On an antique wooden rack nearby were a dozen pairs of hacking, riding, and wet-weather boots. A few velvet-covered riding helmets and cloth caps hung from pegs overhead. McVey slipped into a rain slicker and led them outside to the stone terrace. The light had faded and a gray mist hovered in the air.

“… In a way Brzezinski somewhat typifies this new technocratic class. For them, technological innovation has always represented a kind of deus ex machina that will liberate the West from its current paralysis caused by the absolute decline of its political capital. I mean, what sensible man is a social democrat these days, or even a liberal?”

McVey's voice had grown stronger in the darkness, as if his body had been left behind, hung on a peg in the mud room. Wilson felt the fog against his face as he searched for the stone walk beneath his feet, and for a moment the unreality of the afternoon struck him with depressing familiarity. It was as if he were back again in the EOB, listening to the woolly-haired NSC deputy drone on about the latest covert action plan.

“… He simply has no faith, you see, no secular faith,” McVey continued passionately, “except in the technological sense. For him, the Western political imagination is bankrupt, no longer fertile, like the estates of the Polish diplomatic gentry from which he comes. He can't return. This, incidentally, is why I'm wary of émigré policy experts, East Europeans in particular. Their imaginations are a lost childhood, like Nabokov's. In any case, this is why Brzezinski is so fascinated by technology—these are the new feudal estates. So they invent all this pseudoscientific terminology, this laughable mumbo-jumbo. A diplomat-intellectual shopping in the high-technology PX. For such men, technological innovation will do what Western political and social thought can no longer do—rescue the Western world from its spiritual and moral paralysis to prove its superiority in material terms. Through technology, the Western world is free to reinvent itself. The Soviet mind, petrified by the dead hand of the past, can't. A historical fossil. Watch your footing there; the stones are wet. Don't you agree, Ed?”

“I think so,” Donlon said, but Wilson doubted he'd been listening. In Donlon's indifference he understood why he'd been invited that day. Donlon had been asked by his law firm to advise its client, the Center, on its reorganization problems. Never one to overtax himself, Donlon had thought conveniently of Haven Wilson. That was the way the old-boy network operated, a system that seldom did justice to anyone.

“But of course the engineers on the joint chiefs think the same way,” McVey droned on, his breath a ghostly vapor on the raw, dark air. “So does the Pentagon—engineering solutions, you see. Sensor barriers in Vietnam, MIRVed warheads, and now the MX missile shell game. But they have it all wrong, you see, just as you were saying earlier, Haven. They believe Tom Swift engineering and technological breakthroughs make diplomacy unnecessary. Don't negotiate with the Russians, who are technological primitives, barbarians; simply outgimmick them. But that's the whole point. It was technology as much as pathology that got us into this dreadful mess. We've always had the individual capacity for self-destruction, for suicide; now we have this insane capacity for global annihilation. This new technological class only brings it closer. Being political or social primitives themselves, they concede the social and political realm to the Russians and claim the technological realm for the West. They miss the whole point. It's our very technology that makes diplomacy and political understanding so essential.…”

McVey's indignant voice faded away as they emerged out of the darkness and into the soft yellow glow of the brass coach lamps flanking the low doors of the stone guest cottage. He rang the bell, the chimes sounded from within, and he pushed open the door. “Hello,” he called. “Am I disturbing you? Anyone home?”

“In here,” a woman's voice answered. “Time for a drinkie?”

The hall and living room were low-ceilinged and partially beamed, the old plaster walls bulged here and there. The pine floors were uneven. Two fresh logs lay atop the mound of kindling in the fireplace, awaiting a match. On the low table nearby sat a tray holding a sterling silver cocktail shaker.

“I have two friends with me,” McVey called to their invisible hostess.

“Friends?” She sounded disappointed. She joined them a minute later, a short woman without make-up, wearing a shapeless Ragg sweater with the sleeves pushed back, and a tweed skirt. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and teased out in a kind of wiry bush Haven Wilson's wife once described to him as the “ERA frazzle.” A pencil was in one hand, a cigarette in the other. A pair of steel-rimmed bifocals was pulled far down on her pug nose.

McVey introduced them and she moved forward to shake their hands without enthusiasm, one shoulder dropped, foot thrust out in its mannish shoe, like the captain of a women's softball team meeting her opposite number at home plate. “Yeah, Donlon,” she said negligently. “You're the lawyer going to get the Center reorganized. Why don't you begin by firing Foster?”

“That's not my decision.”

“Just a suggestion.”

Wilson thought her uncomfortable, her tone and gestures deliberately aggressive, a crude persona; yet her face was as much that of a child as of a woman.

“Pauline is working on the Lenin letters,” McVey said. She turned to look at Wilson.

“You're with the Center?”

“No, just a visitor.”

“He may help us with the reorganization,” McVey said.

She continued to study Wilson. “I don't remember you. What's your field?”

“I'm a lawyer.”

“Oh, God, not another one.”

McVey looked sheepish. Donlon examined his watch with a sweeping gesture and proposed that they be on their way. McVey was disappointed, but Pauline Rankin seemed relieved.

The gatehouse at the foot of the long winding road was lit now and a green-uniformed security guard left the office and opened the gates as their headlights approached.

“Well, what do you think?” Donlon asked as they crossed the bridge.

Wilson didn't know what to think. McVey seemed to him the naïf he'd heard about, the Center an improbable collection of eccentrics enclosed in their own world, like the National Security Council, and Donlon merely a salaried retainer, attempting to provide a service. Washington's structures didn't change much, even in the private sector.

“What about these Lenin letters and Pauline Rankin?” he asked as they reached the hard-surfaced road. “What's that all about?”