A Shade of Difference (9 page)

At first, he would admit, this had been a highly uncertain and chancy proposition. With very few exceptions, the major elements of the American news community had greeted with an alarm approaching hysteria his treatment of the Russians in Geneva. So violent and vitriolic had been the attacks upon him from his own country, he remembers now, that it had seemed for forty-eight hours as though the United States, at least as represented by its major communications media, had turned into one gigantic yawp of bellowing agony at the thought of the possible consequences of maintaining national integrity in the face of the Soviet threat. He would not blame anybody for being afraid, he remembered telling Bob Munson in his only show of real anger at the time. God knew he was afraid himself. But at least he wasn’t acting like a sniveling baby about it.

Twenty-four hours later, of course, after the Soviets had made their monstrously preposterous demands, press, radio, and TV had swung completely about, given him the most absolute support, and poured out upon the Russians a scorn at least as vitriolic as that they had so recently flung at him. But he could never forget that first headlong rush to condemn him, without hesitation, without judgment, without waiting to ascertain the facts,
without waiting to see
—the automatic assumption that their own country must per se be wrong and stubborn and pigheaded and without justification, and that the enemy by the same token must have reason and justice on his side.

Of his own inner turmoil and the terrible weakening effect upon him of these attacks by his own countrymen at a moment of absolute decision for the United States, he said nothing publicly then, and it was only after he had been back a few weeks that he made his feelings clear. He had given a stag dinner for some of the nation’s top publishers and unburdened himself a little.

“Do you have any idea what it is like to try to face the world and protect the United States with a lot of you boys yapping at my heels all the time?” he had asked with a mildness that had removed some, but not too much, of the sting. “To do your best to defeat the people whose major consistent aim is quite literally to destroy the United States of America and then pick up the papers or listen to radio or television and find yourself called a traitor and a fool and a—‘an aging child playing with the fires of world destruction,’ as my good friend from the
Post,
here, put it? I’d expect to read that kind of stuff in
Pravda,
but I must confess I was a little surprised to turn around from facing the Soviets and find my back full of American knives.”

They had taken it with a rueful laugh and a round of applause, but they hadn’t liked it at all. Well, he hadn’t liked what they had done, either, and he had gone on to tell them quietly, “There were a couple of moments there when you almost had me convinced that I was wrong and ought to give in. You just stop and think where we would all be tonight if I had, and then ask yourselves how well you have served your country lately.”

The next day the inevitable inside reports from “informed sources” had carried his off-the-record comments to the public. “A face-to-face dressing-down of the American press,” the AP described it. “Veteran observers have rarely heard the President so angry,” the UPI agreed. “H.H. DOES AN H.S.T.,” the
Washington
Daily News
reported cheerfully; “GIVES US HELL.” But he had announced with a friendly smile at the start of his next press conference that he had “decided I’m not going to answer any questions on White House stag dinners,” the correspondents had laughed, and the flurry had died down. When he noted a couple of weeks later that it had really died down, and that the press had apparently decided that his popularity was such as to make a real attack upon him unwise, he had known with a feeling of genuine triumph that he had won a major victory.

“They have a right to criticize,” he told Orrin next day, “and I don’t think one in ten does it with any but the best of motives. But damn it, they’ve got to realize this isn’t a tea party we’re in with these people. They’ve got to do it responsibly.”

“They will,” the Secretary replied, “as long as you’re as popular as you are. My advice is to make the most of it while it lasts.”

And so he has, the President thinks as he looks out the window at the Washington Monument surging whitely upward into the soft autumn sky and waits a trifle impatiently for his lunch. Six months is a short time in which to judge a Presidential stewardship, or any other kind for that matter; but starring with Geneva, which he regards now as being in all likelihood one of the supreme turning points in history, he feels that he has served his people well so far. The immediate and more easily tackled aspects of the world situation have yielded to a firm hand and a forceful approach. The problem and the atmosphere summed up in what the press has come to refer to tersely as “P.G.”—post-Geneva—is another matter. And on that, the President thinks with a sigh and a sudden unhappy expression that destroys the normal amicability of his pleasantly plain face, the vision is dim and the way is not yet clear.

Whether it ever will be—whether, in truth, it ever has been, for any Administration at any time, in the delicate and uncertain area of relations with other powers—he does not know. Here too he is trying to do his best: to transform the psychological shock and advantage of his actions in Geneva into a lasting and long-range policy that will gradually restore a balanced sanity to world affairs and, indeed, place the United States once again in the lead. This last aim he does not mention, save to his Secretary of State, for he knows that it too would draw down upon him the scorn of elements in the country which are either afraid of Soviet reaction or still in the grip of the strange philosophy of the Forties and Fifties that the United States should be satisfied to seek no more than a timid and uneasy equality with its most deadly enemy. Like all who understand the ultimate implications of the American Revolution, the President is something of a revolutionist himself. He is prepared to advance the cause of genuine freedom wherever and whenever and however he can, now that he has succeeded in putting at least a temporary halt to the headlong Russian campaign of imperialism, subversion, hypocrisy, and hate.

But the ways in which these purposes can be achieved remain, P.G., obscure. For the task the President feels he has a diplomatic team as good as any and probably better than most. The Secretary of State is proving to be considerably more diplomatic in his diplomacy than his past performance as a Senator might have indicated, and at the UN the United States has a delegation, able and hard-working, upon most of whose members the President feels he can rely with implicit confidence and trust.

Thinking for a moment of Harold Fry, acting head of the delegation during the lingering and probably fatal heart illness of the Permanent Ambassador, the President smiles in an affectionate way. The senior Senator from West Virginia, with his easygoing nature, steady humor, and stubborn dedication in the cause of the United States, may not be as subtle in his methods as might sometimes seem advisable. Yet he inspires, at the UN as in the Senate, a warm regard and a deep and abiding trust in his integrity and good faith. Lafe Smith of Iowa, replacing Clarence Wannamaker of Montana, who asked to be relieved to return to his Senate duties, is—well, Lafe Smith, liking everybody, liked by everybody, hard-working and able, with the extra ingredient of an attitude toward sex which, the President suspects, makes him more understandable and endearing to a good many delegations than some more strait-laced Americans who have served at the UN in the past. Possibly Lafe’s recent marriage has curtailed his energies and activities, but the President rather doubts it. Unless Lafe has changed mightily, he has probably already strengthened relations with half the young ladies in the Secretariat. Around the world in eighty days, the President thinks with a mild chuckle at his mild joke, and decides he will have to josh Lafe about it when the Senator is next in Washington.

The remainder of the delegation, composed in the usual pattern, consists of the customary State Department advisers and staff and, with an exact attention to the nation’s minorities, a Catholic, a Negro, and a Jew. Of these last, the Negro is the only one who arouses some uneasiness in the mind of the President, who has been wary of changing the delegation left him by his predecessor. LeGage Shelby is something of a problem, and the President, at something of a loss how to solve it, frowns as he considers the rather fiercely clever young man who heads Defenders of Equality For You (DEFY) and has been in the vanguard of the increasingly vigorous drive to overturn the hard-dying racial patterns of the South.

It is not that ’Gage Shelby has been openly opposed to United States policy, but he has managed to convey to both his own government and the United Nations as a whole that he is not entirely happy with such attitudes as those concerning Red China, now awaiting admission in two years’ time under the compromise finally worked out by Yugoslavia and Ceylon; the patient tolerance toward France and her still-uneasy relations with the Algerians; the continuing insistence of the President on adequate disarmament safeguards in the face of the steady and terrifying growth in the “atomic club,” now numbering eleven nations, including Communist China; and the situation in the Caribbean, where the Republic of Panama seems of late to be working with elements not overly friendly to the United States.

’Gage has done a great deal of what he calls, with a sardonic grin, “black missionary work” among the African states; but neither Hal Fry nor the President has been entirely satisfied that all of it was in line with what Washington desired. “It isn’t that I’m out of step with you, Mr. President,” LeGage had told him recently with a disarming smile; “I’m just an inch or two ahead.” Such candor had momentarily stopped the President, as he was sure LeGage had known it would, and he had only said mildly, “Well, you understand of course that it is advisable for all of us to proceed along the same general line if we are to present a united front to the world.” “Absolutely,” LeGage had said, again with the disarming grin. “You and I couldn’t see more eye to eye on anything, Mr. President.”

But, the President thinks now, of this he is not so sure; and how to handle LeGage within the context in which he must be handled is among the more annoying, if not major, problems that now concern the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. DEFY, a youthful and turbulent offshoot of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed out of the impatience of the younger generation with the cautious older, commands the loyalties of many of the nation’s Negroes in the college and young-married levels. It was for this reason that the President’s predecessor appointed LeGage to the delegation a year ago and, shortly before his death, announced his intention of appointing him again. The President has gone along with it for reasons that are as practical as his predecessor’s: the simple fact that LeGage is well on his way to becoming one of the nation’s major colored politicians, plus the fact that the increasing prominence of the new African states seems to make him a natural for the UN assignment. Now the President wishes he had chosen someone like Cullee Hamilton, even though under the custom, which governs appointment of the United States delegation, the Senate and House alternate in providing two delegates each year, and this is a Senate year.

Somewhere, the President recalls, he has heard that Cullee and LeGage roomed together at Howard University right here in Washington, and it is quite possible that the young Congressman from California may have some useful insights into the chairman of DEFY that would prove helpful to the White House. He makes a mental note to talk to him about it if the opportunity arises and thinks with genuine pleasure of his few brief contacts with Cullee in the past. He has always found him eminently sensible, he thinks approvingly—and then assures himself hastily that he doesn’t mean that as patronizingly as it might sound if said aloud. Cullee has not been sensible in the negative sense that Seab Cooley might use the word in describing a Negro; rather, he has seemed sensible to the President in the sense of his understanding of the needs of all parties involved in what the President considers the major domestic problem, human, economic, emotional, and moral, of twentieth-century America.

“I don’t think we should move too fast,” Cullee had said three years ago when the then Vice President had asked him to drop by his Senate office for a private chat after the Congressman had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “but we should
move.
That’s the important thing. We’ve got to keep moving. History won’t let us stop now.”

There was, the President was pleased to find, an absence of the customary cant, true but fatuous in its false emphasis, about “the eyes of the world are on you, America.” There was just a firm insistence on America being true to what America ought to be, irrespective of what anybody else might think. Just because there were certain things that America, being America, must necessarily do and certain high standards that she must eventually live up to if she were to be ultimately whole.

Compared with LeGage, who is always giving lengthy interviews about “America’s solemn obligation in the eyes of humanity,” and “America’s duty to see that she does not disappoint humanity’s hopes,” this is a very sensible position on Cullee’s part. It is not demogogic—indeed, the Congressman is so calm-spoken and mild in outward bearing that political Washington sometimes wonders how he ever got elected in the first place—and it is not the sort of thing to win big headlines in the papers. But it is, the President suspects, an attitude that, matched by a similar attitude on the part of responsible whites both North and South, will ultimately provide a solution if solution is to be found.

If
solution is found!

He snorts, startling the butler bringing in his lunch.

It has to be found.

He sighs at the unending complexity of the problems that beset the President, and instantly a hundred pressing urgencies rush into his mind. Trouble in Asia—trouble in Africa—trouble in the Middle East—trouble in Latin America—disarmament talks—a slight sag in business—unemployment rising—missile program still lagging behind the Russians—new integration crisis possible any moment in South Carolina—the space program—maintaining the moon expedition, readying another—Governor Edward Jason of California and his ambitions—Orrin’s ambitions—his own ambitions and/or lack of them—criticism by America’s enemies—criticism by America’s friends—the United Nations—anti-American riots in Lima, West Germany, Manila, Capetown, Panama City—bills he must sign—people he must see—things he must worry about … it never ends. And always, overriding all else, the constant evil pressures from the Communist world, inflaming every problem, increasing every difficulty, negating every hope for peace in a blind, insensate drive toward world destruction so automatic by now that he doubts if the Kremlin could reverse itself and rejoin the decent purposes of a decent humanity even if it wanted to.